Effectiveness and Efficiency
This holiday season, I received two books describing how we can help the environment.
The first one, the New York Times’ green book, was a disappointment. The celebrity vignettes were well-intentioned, if at times bizarre (William McDonough and Cameron Diaz?)
Some of the advice in this book isn’t very good. Take the following travel tip:
Seek out locations that aren’t overexposed, overcrowded, or in environmenmentally sensitive areas. Overcrowding in already densely populated areas can lead to increased pollution by wastewater, garbage, heating, noise, and traffic emissions.
Unfortunately, the impact of tourism on the environment is more complicated.
As any trail designer will tell you, concentrating visitors in certain areas can actually be good for the environment, because it limits overall damage. Similarly, it hurts the environment less to ride the teacups at “overexposed, overcrowded” Disney World than it does to ride an airboat through the environmentally sensitive Everglades.
But you can also visit the Everglades without particularly hurting the environment, provided you stay on the boardwalks and paved paths. In fact, you might become so enchanted with the amazing bird, alligator, and otter populations that you are moved to reduce your environmental impact upon returning home.
What’s more, income from legitimate eco-tourism empowers some communities to avoid unsustainably harvesting their natural resources!
We generate pollution everywhere. In a densely-populated city, the larger shared buildings waste less heat. Destinations are closer together, so we don’t have to drive as far. That means less pollution, not more.
The chapter on school advises:
Try using a digital library or the World Wide Web instead of traveling to your local branch to do research. You’ll save time and money. The circulation of books from public libraries is 1.9 billion a year, or about 7 items checked out per person. If every American checked out and researched online a single book a year, we would save three hundred million trips to the bookshelves.
These numbers sound fishy to me, but let’s assume they’re right. Let’s further assume that no one ever walks or bikes to the library, which has minimal environmental impact.
I’m all for the Internet, but do we really want to discourage kids from using the library? The Internet is a gigantic but profoundly non-authoritative source of information. Information published in books has to pass a higher threshhold of quality and suitability.
Electronic books are great, but the availability of titles remains limited. And e-book delivery platforms are still pretty expensive.
In order to function as citizens of a participatory democracy, it is imperative that we remain well-informed. Without resources like libraries we wouldn’t be able to cope effectively with the challenges that affect our environment.
Then the chapter on work goes on to give this contradictory advice:
More than two hours of the average office worker’s time is used per day sending e-mails and surfing the Internet. Internet data servers use as much energy in the United States as is used by all U.S. TVs combined.
And the final fifty-one pages of the book are, you guessed it, references to Internet data servers! Why pulp trees to print web addresses that will already be out of date when the book is published? Why not set up a single web site, include the URL at the end of the book, and maintain links to everything from there?
Clearly, there is work to be done improving the energy efficiency of Internet server farms. Instead, the authors of the green book would have us to communicate and read less! Unless we’re using the Internet to avoid a trip to the library.
It is unreasonable to expect that we should stop living our lives to help the environment. Ultimately, the whole point of environmentalism is to enrich our lives by securing the wonder of nature for ourselves and our descendants.
The book’s saving grace is a page on which Will Ferrell recounts the “limitless joy” that driving his electric car to the hazardous waste facility affords him. For my money, they should have let Ferrell write the whole book.
I’m glad to say that I really did enjoy Living Like Ed, A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life, by Ed Begley Jr. Ed is the real deal. His book is full of great information, much of which I had never read anywhere else.
January 25th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Ed Begley Jr. ?? What could he possible have to tell us? Let me guess, he drives an electric car, brings his own bags to the grocery store and put solar panels on his 4,000 square foot house.
January 26th, 2009 at 8:45 am
He says it’s a two bedroom. It looks fairly modest in his TV show on Discovery’s Planet Green channel.
January 27th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Ok, now who thought this would happen? So I was thinking about your post and realized that I had to debate a certain point.
Although you may be right, that the per person pollution created in an urban environment is lower than that in rural areas, I think a big problem is that because of the concentration of pollutants, there is no simple way to deal with the fallout.
A farmer who grazes his cows in a pasture enriches the environment by adding the manure to the soil. The concentration of cattle in a feedlot creates a toxic mix of nitrates and bacteria that become a serious pollutant.
A delicate eco-system like the Everglades couldn’t over come even slight crowding, but in general, nature has many systems already in place to deal effectively with waste and pollutants in moderate amounts.
January 29th, 2009 at 1:19 am
Maybe I’m being naive, and actual Everglades visitors dump half-eaten buckets of fried chicken into the mangrove swamp from the open window of their campers, just before releasing an unwanted python.
Most of the people I’ve seen on our visits seemed to behave. If everybody parks in the parking lot, stays on the paths, and puts their trash in the trash can, I don’t think tourism has to be a problem.